Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 16

Hey all,
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**Usual Disclaimers**
These posts will often contain talk about future work we&#039;re doing, or planning to do, that isn&#039;t yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you&#039;d like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler
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**Some possible 8.7 changes**
Some potential 8.7 patch changes below. 8.7&#039;s a small patch, particularly since we&#039;re approaching midseason so are putting some time into that. It&#039;ll be on the lighter side as a result, with a fair bit of it made up from things that didn&#039;t make it in time for 8.6. Early on in the 8.7 development cycle we&#039;ll also be more focused on systemic changes than champion stuff, a bit of extra champion balance work is likely to make it in later though.
Champions
* Swain nerf. Most likely candidates are Q CD (might have lowered it too far) and Q damage. Still figuring details out though, nothing solid yet.
* Rumble buff. Straight Q and R damage buffs from 8.6 were ok but don&#039;t think they were targeted enough at Rumble&#039;s problems. Trying to do a bit more as a result.
* Ahri changes (still working on clearer highs and lows, plus general strengths and weaknesses).
* LB changes. More likely to be in 8.8 at this point because there&#039;s some visual effects work still needed that&#039;s not on track for an 8.7 release. Possible it still makes it into 8.7 though.
* Kayn changes that should smooth out transformation point gain over game time. Likely to be a slight buff and should help lane Kayn a bit more than jungle Kayn too.
Runes
* Manaflow Band nerf/reshape (reduces mana gating too much)
* Presence of Mind reshape (too strong on its best users, not strong enough on many others)
* Numbers tuning on some other runes that are just not balanced well enough (e.g. Approach Velocity is weak, Celerity is strong etc)
Items
* Still working to make Locket more contextual (good some games, bad others) and probably less effective against single target burst champs
* Looking at Ninja Tabi, given they&#039;re really dominant choices for the boots slot and can have a very large impact on some lanes. Number of things we need to figure out here, including how much they&#039;re just too good a general choice, how much they&#039;re just too strong, how important they are as a safety valve to AA champs, how much of a safety valve (or excessive counter?) to Lethality, what the right mixture of Armor versus other defensive effects is etc. We&#039;re trying to avoid solving a couple of problems only to replace them with other equally large ones.
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**Non LoL related game design: Floating Combat Text in Diablo 3**
Interesting article below where some of the Diablo 3 team talk about their approach to building a better combat text approach, including problems they had to solve around localizing for different languages, delivering both satisfaction and readability, working well with a variety of different hero builds and appropriate use of color. Well worth a read if that sounds like your sort of thing.
https://eu.diablo3.com/en/blog/19996041/engineering-diablo-iiis-damage-numbers-22-01-2016
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png

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